A few 2025 updates to Paul's recommendations, some of which are now outdated:
Increase the delay on reward loops with your phone by activating developer settings and setting colorspaces to black and white and setting animation speeds to 2x or 5x. I tried going back to 2x after months with 5x and it felt palpably neurosis inducing.
keyboard shortcuts to snap windows to any half or third of the screen (or full screen).
In Windows 10 you can,
Very convenient.
One of my most-used tools is very simple: an Alfred snippet that lets me paste-as-plain-text using Cmd+Opt+V.
Video Speed Controller
That sounds nice!
Hope it works in mobile chrome. I prefer all talking videos at 2x, and have to go back to youtube desktop to get it. It will help me get off Youtube, and move to alternate video sites now that Google's has changed it's motto to Do Evil.
EDIT: yay! Works at Bitchute
And for people on the Vim side, there's VimOutliner for doing workflowy-like outlines, also with a time-tracking component.
clipmenu lets you configure the history amount - I set it to 1000. also you can save snippets to paste (accessed via a different hotkey) - e.g. your email address, email templates, common code snippets in developer console
also, a possible alternative to karabiner for vim users is wasavi, which lets you use vim in browser textareas
You might be interested in Inbox When Ready which can hide your inbox and do a number of other things.
AutoHotKey can remap keys in Windows, among other things. I used it to get basic Vim commands in any text field. It also has a Python module. I haven't found a good alternative for Linux or Mac.
JumpCut for OS X
My paste hotkey for it is Shift-Cmd-V and you can hold one key after to arrow through old items.
BTW, try taking portraits with a camera mounted on a tripod or just somehow fixed in place, eith Christmas lights for illumination. The results are quite magical, although a large portion of the photos are too dark.
I've accumulated a lot of small applications and items that make my life incrementally better. Most of these ultimately came from someone else's recommendation, so I thought I'd pay it forward by posting ten of my favorite small improvements.
(I've given credit where I remember who introduced the item into my life. Obviously the biggest part of the credit goes to the creator.)
Video Speed Controller lets you speed up HTML 5 video; it gives a nicer interface than the YouTube speed adjustment and works for most videos displayed in a browser (including e.g. netflix/amazon).
(Credit: Stephanie Zolayvar?)
Spectacle on OSX provides keyboard shortcuts to snap windows to any half or third of the screen (or full screen).
I use tab wrangler to automatically close tabs (and save a bookmark) after 10m. I keep gmail and vimflowy pinned so that they don't close. For me, closing tabs after 10m is usually the right behavior.
I use AdBlock for anything that grabs attention even if isn't an ad. I usually block "related content," "next stories," the whole youtube sidebar, everything on Medium other than the article, the gmail sidebar, most comment sections, etc. Similarly, I use kill news feed to block my Facebook feed.
I often need to write or look up emails during the day, which would sometimes lead me to read/respond to new emails and switch contexts. I've mostly fixed the problem by leaving gmail open to my list of starred emails rather than my inbox, ad-blocked the "Inbox (X)" notification, and pin gmail so that I can't see the "Inbox (X)" title.
I prefer the soft light from christmas lights to white overhead lights or even softer lamps. My favorite are multicolored lights, though soft white lights also seem OK.
(Credit: Ben Hoffman)
Karabiner remaps keys in a very flexible way. (Unfortunately, it only works on OSX pre-Sierra. Would be very interested if there is any similarly flexible software that )
Some changes have helped me a lot:
I'd definitely pay > a minute a day for these changes.
I find split+tented keyboards much nicer than usual keyboards. I use a Kinesis Freestyle 2 with this to prop it up. I put my touchpad on a raised platform between the keyboard halves. Alternatively, you might prefer the wire cutter's recommendations.
(Credit: Emerald Yang)
Vimflowy is similar to Workflowy, with a few changes: it lets you "clone" bullets so they appear in multiple places in your document, has marks that you can jump to easily, and has much more flexible motions / macros / etc. I find all of these very helpful. The biggest downside for most people is probably modal editing (keystrokes issue commands rather than inserting text).
The biggest value add for me is the time tracking plugin. I use vimflowy essentially constantly, so this gives me extremely fine-grained time tracking for free.
Running locally (download from github) lets you use vimflowy offline, and using the SQLite backend scales to very large documents (larger than workflowy can handle).
(Credit: Jeff Wu and Zachary Vance.)
Keeps a buffer of the last 20 things you've copied, so that you can paste any one of them. Source for OSX is on github here, I'm not sure if it can be easily compiled/installed (binaries used to be available). Would be curious if anyone knows a good alternative or tries to compile it.
(Credit: Jeff Wu.)